


You've Been Here Before

by Soundingonlyatnightasyousleep



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Access Intimacy, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemons, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, also pre-the wrath of the lamb, boat to hell, definitely about romance, not not about disability, team 'abigail hobbs just needs people to stop loving her', this is actually a fic about Will
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 03:46:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5852761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soundingonlyatnightasyousleep/pseuds/Soundingonlyatnightasyousleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The fact is you have it. The task is to want it.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Season three, told backwards through daemons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You've Been Here Before

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary from Dessa's "Sadie Hawkins."

“Agapius did not settle when we saw you bathed in blood and moonlight. She settled when you pulled us over.” 

Hannibal touches, and it only feels as it ever has. The thing that makes Will still his breathing, makes him feel all the air and all the blood thrumming through his organs, is when Hannibal sweeps them all up, Will too, into his arms. 

Will's daemon writhes and changes there, between their bodies. 

"Had you never touched before this? Never felt your soul's skin?" Hannibal murmurs in little breaths over Will's nose. He sways them to the strains of something sentimental leaking into the scene, and the wooden deck is solid still beneath their feet. 

“I did dream of you touching it,” Will gives. Dark gentleness night after night. He was never there in the dreams. Only his soul in Hannibal’s hands.

“Mmm,” Hannibal says, “I thought of you too. I saw your daemon there in some of our minds’ shared chambers, the people we are roaming free during the night. But I prefer you as you are now.” The deep fondness on his face clicks home in a space inside Will. “I would have your body here too.”

Will sighs, lets himself and his daemon be held. Lets himself hold his daemon. "I still won't name it, you know." 

Hannibal hums in response, draws them in closer. Will's soul twists between them, even truly held for the first time. Like atoms in solid matter still vibrate in their settings. The deck and the salt spray and the sky all seem a piece, pitching and yawing all together. Joints in the world finally fitting snug. In Will's mouth, a firefly glows.  
\---  
"He asked me once, when it was starting to go bad--well, I suppose it was bad from the start, since he was killing those families the whole time--he asked me if I missed seeing the light.” 

Reba McClane’s cat, Nareen, is sighted. He peers through huge yellow eyes at Will from her arms. She holds him closer, strokes in firm lines down his back. 

“I figure you know something about that,” she continues, mouth twisting wryly. “Other people always asking if you miss how it was before.”

Will nods, even though no one has asked him in words, only in sidelong glances at how he has changed. Deformities. “There’s nothing wrong with you for it,” he reassures her. His daemon inches closer to Reba’s, twitching with the forms it assumes. 

Reba smiles. “I know. I like what I do have. I like my cripple’s anger. I just didn’t think that he’d be one of the people who would try to cultivate dependency. The ones who give to you like you’re missing something.” She speaks strongly, a little rehearsedly. Nareen flicks his ears. “It doesn’t matter how I feel about the light. I have what I have.” 

Will suddenly feels exhausted. Empty and metallic with how this person he had come here to comfort was offering comfort to him. 

She reaches out and takes his hands. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, either, for the record. No matter what you miss.” 

In her hospital bed, Reba trembles, but beats with fullness.  
\---  
"Is Hannibal...in love with me?"

Bedelia looks so calmly back at him. Measuredly. Always scant and careful cupfuls that she offered drawn from the well of herself. 

"The sweet hunger he feels at the thought of you...the swollen satiety he feels at the sight of you...it all mixes in his belly. For you, his body is illuminated," she sighs, "from the inside out." Her Delphineous flutters slowly on her shoulder. He could have been a flower stirring in the wind instead of a living butterfly.

Still. Still in love. Will had seen it as he said it. A piece of raw shock scrabbles in him at the thought. Once, he had known that they were in love. Their soft, shifting dreams had mixed freely, before they had coalesced into the solid walls of the chapel in their shared memory palace. Before Hannibal had split him open and ran across the sea with this inscrutable woman who would have her soul be a flower if she could. But still. Still Hannibal waits for him in their little chapel. 

Will's daemon lets out a long, hitching cry. Bedelia turns her gaze back onto the shifting, liminal lump of indeterminate feathers and fur. He knows she is thinking of taking his soul in her hands and crushing it into gristle and then Dust, and he thinks of doing the same thing to Hannibal.  
\---  
Xalbot has kept a hitch in his step where Alana has taken pains to hide hers. Her hips rode like Will’s shoulder, perhaps—their stops not noticeable to the untrained eye, but gathering pain throughout the day. Alana did not let pain gather in Xalbot, so he limped and let his feathers trail on the gleaming office floor. 

She looks dusty-soft at him, and Will only feels cold. His daemon paces a short walk in the corner. Any hitches in its steps are lost to the hitches that its overall movement consists of. Xalbot does not try to speak to Will’s daemon.

Alana, he had learned from Jack, had testified that Dr. Lecter was insane. Impossible to plead unconsciousness for something like him. 

“How are you?” she asks. Will feels the memory of _Honestly, I have no idea_ and an overstretched grin lurking in his skin. 

“Good,” he says instead. He had fished, and Molly’s sheepdog watched over them. In the stream by their house, not the stream of his mind. They were good. “You’re still with Margot?”

Alana glows at the question. All her glowing is pulled closer to her now. Just beneath her skin, showing through in patches. The walls of this place do not eat at her. Will no longer marvels at it and thoughts like it, just tries to pull his own self in closer.

His daemon presses itself against the window. 

“We’re good too,” Alana finally says. She means it deeply. Had probably smoothed Makatza’s flank after Muskrat Farm and had Xalbot smoothed in turn by Margot. She means it, even for how she moves stiff with dread and other things now, on the other side of three years.

After Muskrat Farm he had plucked his fingers over the clothes Hannibal had dressed him in. His mind does not hold anything else from those days. 

Will and Alana sit, silent, pressed in by what their little visit is preparing them for. She is stiff with fear and knowledge of good and evil. He looks at her and he cannot remember when his body stopped yearning for her to hold him.  
\---  
Molly never tries to hold Will’s daemon. She just shrugs wryly at him. “Really, I mean it, it’s fine. Everybody’s got their thing.”

Reijo never specifically tries to touch Will either, only bounds along with the pack when they swarm over him, one piece of fur among many. Molly doesn’t worry about letting her daemon run with animals. 

She tells him that Reijo settled when her first husband held him. They had been high school sweethearts. “Like I said, everybody’s got their thing, huh,” she tells him in the flickering firelight. She squeezes Will’s hands tight, and sometimes when their heartbeats catch together he feels the mourning work they are both doing.

Intermittently, joy wells up in him when he lies beside her in her bed. Intermittently, he strikes apologies at the dark.  
\---  
Will cannot make Mason’s whining speeches cohere into words and meaning right now. He squeals like his Marikia, both having holes where their snouts should be. Will entertains a brief hope for Margot that Makatza kicks their skulls in. 

He is here, he is dressed, he is at another of an endless procession of dinners where someone is meant to die. It tastes like congealing blood in his nasal passages, probably is congealing blood. There is the feeling that the top of his skull will pop loose and clatter onto the table if he hits his head hard enough, and he can’t comb through himself finely enough to remember if he wants that. 

He bites Cordell’s raw, fleshy cheek when it dips into view and ejects it as quickly from his mouth. He doesn’t look at what Hannibal’s face must be doing. He doesn’t look.  
\---  
Jack looms stone-battered and huge. It seems as if chapel glass will shake free from him with every movement, the shards not sharp enough to stay in his skin. 

“I came,” he says, spreading his palms. 

Ettoria never touches Will’s daemon even now, never tries to pick it up in her jaws and move it like she moves other daemons around to Jack’s liking. Perhaps they had gotten used to not doing that with Will. 

Will looks evenly at Jack, sees his blood and his shock flowing freely in some other world. _Why_ , he doesn’t ask. Somewhere above them, a body is being cut down. 

“I’m going to see the places I saw with Bella,” Jack finally sighs. “I’ll come back when I need to. When you do what you need to do.” Ettoria pads out after him, quiet for her size. Claws on marble.

Will begins his trek to where he knows La Primavera is. Where he will wait for spring.  
\--  
Sei is placid for a mongoose. He does nothing but yawn dismissively at Will. Will is beginning to suspect that under Chiyoh’s expressionless exterior, she is doing the same. 

When Will sails off the back of the train, courtesy of Chiyoh’s well-placed shove, Sei is nowhere to be seen. He has the horrible feeling that Sei didn’t even bother waking up for this. 

He doesn’t know whether his daemon flies off with him, hasn’t developed that pathway of knowing in nine months or a lifetime, but when he has limped behind the stag to the end of the tracks, he turns, and it is there.  
\---  
Will lies on the chapel steps after Abigail dies for the second—third—time. Like the cool stone pressing through to his kidneys will still the churning inside him. He clutches at a black tuft of Ochel’s hair, turning it in the light. It should have dissipated along with the rest of the little deer, along with the rest of Abigail. 

He knows that he was alone on the boat. That is the nature of boats, to be alone. He knows that he is alone now. But sometime in between, Abigail or her imago had walked beside him.

He tries to imagine Abigail, whole again, leaving him. Walking away. He tries to imagine himself, whole again, leaving her. He tries to imagine the wholeness, then the leaving, separate things. 

Abigail should have had both. Will could have neither. 

The hair melts into seawater between his fingertips.  
\---  
In a kitchen thick with blood, Will’s daemon is carved into existence under Hannibal’s knife. 

For that moment, he lets himself want it.

**Author's Note:**

> Everyone's daemon's listed in name, gender, species form:
> 
> Will-unnamed, ungendered, unsettled  
> Hannibal-Agapius, female firefly  
> Bedelia-Delphineous, male butterfly  
> Reba-Nareen, male African wildcat  
> Alana-Xalbot, peacock  
> Margot-Maktatza, female wild horse  
> Mason-Marikia, female domestic pig  
> Molly-Reijo, male sheepdog  
> Jack-Ettoria, female grizzly bear  
> Chiyoh-Sei, male mongoose  
> Abigail-Ochel, female deer
> 
> Hannibal's Agapius is only pretending to have settled (as a housecat) most of their life. They don't bother maintaining the illusion after Mizumono, but Agapius genuinely does settle post-Fall.
> 
> Will was born without a separated daemon. This is treated as a birth defect by everyone around him. It turns out post-Mizumono that his separated daemon is not any less unsettling.
> 
> Yes, Sei can go independently of Chiyoh, meaning that she is a witch. The idea of Chiyoh having an actual mongoose that just _cannot be bothered_ was too good. 
> 
> Abigail has a melanistic (black) doe daemon. Yes, hunting deer with her father was even creepier in this universe. "Ochel" is a Hebrew word that means either "eat" or "food" depending on which syllable is emphasized. This is definitely a misuse of my Hebrew lessons. 
> 
> I know it is a terrible love between Hannibal and Will, that Hannibal has done terrible things. The thing is, Will wants it, and I cannot begrudge him wanting it. As seen in the show, things turn out way worse when Will doesn't let himself want things. 
> 
> This is also a fic about disability, like pretty much all my fic is, let's be real. Will's strangeness is a part of him too.


End file.
